The powers recognise the Provisional Government of National Unity

On 5 July 1945 the governments of the United States and Britain recognised the Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN), formed in Warsaw a week earlier, as the government of Poland, and at the same time withdrew recognition from the Polish government-in-exile in London. On that day the authorities that had represented fighting Poland alongside the Allies since September 1939 lost the status of a recognised government in the eyes of their two most important allies.

The decision closed the dispute over who should represent Poland after the war, which had been fought out since 1943 between London, Moscow and the Western powers. It was settled on terms that in practice handed power in the country to the communists backed by the Soviet Union, with the promise of free elections as the only safeguard.

The road to 5 July

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Big Three agreed that the Provisional Government operating in Poland – which had grown out of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) and had been recognised since January 1945 only by the USSR – would be “reorganised on a broader democratic basis” by including politicians from Poland and from the emigration. The new government was to pledge itself to hold “free and unfettered elections”. Once this had happened, the United States and Britain were to establish diplomatic relations with it.

Negotiations on this stalled for several months. In the spring the NKVD arrested sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State, and their trial was held in Moscow in parallel with the talks on the government. On 21 June an agreement was reached in Moscow under which, on 28 June, the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw with Edward Osóbka-Morawski as prime minister. Deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a former prime minister of the London government, who had agreed to join a communist-dominated government in the hope that elections would make it possible to change the balance of power. Of the government’s 21 members only a few came from Mikołajczyk’s peasant party and London circles, while public security, the army and propaganda remained in the hands of the communists and their allies.

The decision in Washington and London

For the Western governments Mikołajczyk’s presence in the cabinet was sufficient proof that the Yalta condition had been met. On 5 July 1945 President Harry Truman announced that the United States had recognised the new government in Warsaw, and Winston Churchill’s government made a similar declaration. In Britain it was also polling day in the general election. Both governments stressed that they were counting on elections being held soon in Poland and on Poles abroad being able to return freely.

Earlier, on 29 June, the Provisional Government of National Unity had been recognised by France and Sweden, and in the following weeks most states of the anti-Hitler coalition followed suit, among them China, Italy and Canada. According to lists cited in Polish historical literature, however, relations with the London government were maintained by, among others, the Holy See, Spain, Ireland, Lebanon, Cuba and some Latin American republics. The relationship with the Vatican lasted longest: Ambassador Kazimierz Papée remained accredited until 1958, and the Holy See formally withdrew recognition from the government-in-exile only on 19 October 1972.

London’s protest

Tomasz Arciszewski’s government had rejected the Moscow agreement even before recognition was granted. In a note delivered to the powers on 25 June it declared that it could hand over its constitutional powers only to a government chosen in free elections at home. On 28 June, the day the new government was formed, Arciszewski in a government communiqué called it a “self-appointed political creation made up of communists and foreign agents” and declared that some Poles would struggle at home with the reality of a police state, while others would remain in the free world “to become the voice of the voiceless”.

After 5 July the government and President Władysław Raczkiewicz protested against the withdrawal of recognition and refused to accept the decision. Raczkiewicz declared that he would hand over his office only to a successor chosen by the nation “in democratic elections free from all coercion and all threat”. This formula became the basis for the existence of the authorities in exile for the next 45 years. In a protest to the British government, the ambassador in London, Edward Raczyński, likened the legal basis of the new government to that of the governments the Germans had set up in conquered countries.

Embassies, archives and money

The withdrawal of recognition had immediate practical consequences. The London government’s diplomatic missions in the states that had recognised the Warsaw government ceased to be Polish embassies and were to be handed over to Warsaw’s representatives. Raczyński ended his mission in London, which he had held since 1934, and in August the embassy building in Portland Place was taken over by Henryk Strasburger, the new government’s first ambassador to Britain. The president and the government-in-exile kept only private premises in London, chief among them the presidential residence in Eaton Place. In Washington Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski also had to step down; according to American and Polish studies, part of the embassy’s archive was transferred in time to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where it survived as a historical collection.

Other documents and property met a similar fate. The ministries in exile tried to keep out of Warsaw’s hands files that could endanger people at home or that concerned military and intelligence matters; some of them later ended up in émigré academic institutions in London. To wind up the London government’s apparatus, the British Treasury set up the Interim Treasury Committee for Polish Questions. According to émigré sources, the committee, on which Raczyński also sat, oversaw the liquidation of the London offices, payments to their staff and care for Polish refugees in the British Empire, financed from British funds. The state funds and property disputed between the two governments became the subject of negotiations that lasted for years. Over time the government-in-exile built up its own finances based on voluntary contributions from the émigré community.

An army without a government

The most serious problem was the Polish Armed Forces in the West, which in the summer of 1945 numbered – according to various tallies – from about 195,000 to more than 220,000 soldiers, including General Władysław Anders’s II Corps in Italy and the 1st Armoured Division in Germany. Formally they were subordinate to the authorities in London, which were no longer recognised, and operationally to the British command. Britain had no intention of disbanding them overnight, but nor could it recognise their subordination to a government with which it had broken off relations.

Many of the soldiers, especially in II Corps, came from the eastern lands that had been awarded to the USSR at Yalta; many had passed through Soviet labour camps and prisons, and the news from home – including reports of the arrests of members of the underground – did not encourage a return. The government in Warsaw called for repatriation, and the British government encouraged it but compelled no one. In the end, according to historians’ estimates, more than a hundred thousand soldiers returned to Poland, roughly two in five, while the rest were taken into the Polish Resettlement Corps, set up in 1946, which prepared them for civilian life in exile.

Consequences

At the Potsdam Conference, which opened on 17 July, Poland was already represented by a delegation of the new government that included Bolesław Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski and Mikołajczyk. In the conference protocol the Big Three noted with satisfaction the formation of the Provisional Government of National Unity, and the United States and Britain gave assurances that they had secured property belonging to the Polish state on their territory for the government in Warsaw. The powers undertook to facilitate the return home of Poles abroad, including soldiers, and the Warsaw government affirmed its readiness to hold free elections. The first post-war US ambassador, Arthur Bliss Lane, began his mission in Warsaw on 1 August 1945.

Recognition also opened the way for the Warsaw government to the United Nations. Poland had not been represented at the San Francisco Conference, and at the signing of the Charter of the United Nations a space had been left blank for it. A representative of the Warsaw government signed on its behalf in October 1945, which placed Poland among the founding members of the UN.

The government-in-exile survived as the political centre of the emigration. After Raczkiewicz’s death in 1947 the presidency passed to August Zaleski, and the London authorities existed until 22 December 1990, when the last president in exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, handed the insignia of office to President Lech Wałęsa, who had been elected in free elections.

Place in the history of the war

Poland, the first victim of German aggression in September 1939, fought alongside the Allies from the first to the last day of the war in Europe, and its government never collaborated with the occupier. The withdrawal of recognition from its government by Washington and London – two months after Germany’s capitulation – was for the emigration a symbol of the fact that Poland had ended the war on the side of the victors, but without the sovereignty for which it had fought. For the Western powers it was a compromise with Joseph Stalin, based on the Yalta promise of free elections. That promise was not kept: the elections of January 1947 were rigged, and in October 1947 Mikołajczyk had to flee the country.